


The Benefits Inherent To Shipwrecks

by Laurasauras



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, MerMay, Pirates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 04:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18731791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurasauras/pseuds/Laurasauras
Summary: Vriska finds herself an unwilling survivor of a siren attack. Dirk's kind of okay with meeting someone who for some reason isn't falling for his magic.This fic is currently on hiatus while I focus on finishing other ones.





	The Benefits Inherent To Shipwrecks

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Scy for the title!

A loud cracking noise wakes you from your sleep and you’re on your feet immediately. The whole ship tilts crazily to the side and you have to grab your hammock to keep from falling ass over teakettle. This isn’t that unusual; it’s not like a smooth ride is guaranteed, especially with the useless crew on this baby, but you think something may be wrong. The door to your bedroom is harder to open than usual, but you have a motherfucking robot arm, you are not daunted by physical challenges! You wrench it open and are immediately hit by a wave of water that knocks you off your feet. 

You jump back up to standing. The water’s actually not even up to your waist. You look around to make sure that John didn’t see you get dunked by a puny wave like that, even if it is in the middle of the ship and caught you off guard. 

No one appears to be around, which considering the events is surprising. A few days ago a small fire started and everyone was running around everywhere all crazy and surely this constitutes a bigger emergency. After all, fires don’t last long on a ship surrounded by water.

You run down the hall as best you can when your legs are almost entirely underwater. It’s … not very efficient. Or graceful. You don’t think swimming would be better though, so you just haul your legs through the water forcefully. Another wave crashes around the corner in front of you and you have to slam your robot arm into the hull of the ship so you don’t lose your progress.

This is just such incredible bullshit. 

It takes basically eternity for you to get up to the deck. When you’re there, you see John at the wheel with his stupid grin, wings out shamelessly. He’s not even the captain! You start to march over to him to tell him off, but the world shifts again. 

You cling to the deck with your robot arm, and you cling to your robot arm with everything else you’ve got. It might be extra strong, but the shoulder it connects to is just a shoulder. 

‘JOHN, YOU’RE AN IDIOT!’ you scream.

You don’t think he hears you over the sound of the ship crashing. Which is a shame, because now how is he supposed to know he’s an idiot? You are not dying because John _fucking_ Egbert crashed your ship. The craggy lengths of rock that he so beautifully just aimed for are basically perfect for breaking a ship on. You’re already soaked to the bone, but you still are incredibly put out when it becomes obvious that you’re going down with this ship.

You're glad you know how to swim. Not many on the ship can; it's kinda assumed that if you get knocked overboard in the middle of the ocean being able to doggy paddle isn't going to save you. 

You clamp down on your urge to do anything that might make you waste the lungful of air you still have and move your arms through the water so you can orient yourself. Right, the rocks that you crashed into are also the closest thing you have to dry land. You start to swim towards them when something heavier than you falls through the water and slams into your arm. Your prosthetic is tough, but it’s not meant to withstand abuse like that and it cracks open, exposing the wires and cables that connect into your nerves. 

You scream, even though you’re underwater and you can’t afford the air, you can’t help it. Your hair is fucking everywhere, you’re drowning and your arm is killing you.

You’re basically properly pissed off. 

Your anger doesn’t stop you from passing out.

*

When you wake up, you’re under no delusions as to what happened. You hurt far too much to be allowed memory loss. Your throat feels like it’s even drier than your lips, and when you touch your tongue to them they’re bleeding because they’ve cracked. Or maybe because you hit your face on the rock you’re collapsed on. Face first, naturally.

Your head aches in a way that is part dehydration (throbbing in the front and mussing up your thoughts) and part you-used-it-to-break-your-fall. Your shoulder is raw and sensitive where it meets your prosthesis, but you’re no longer getting anything from your arm itself. Which is actually a terrible sign. You’re not supposed to get the internals wet, though, so you’re not surprised. 

You move your fingers experimentally and find that you’re not in so much pain that it drowns out annoying shit like the stinging of bloodied knuckles dunked in seawater. At least you can move them. Your flesh arm isn’t broken, obviously. You lift it off the rock and pull your hand up and next to your face, palm down. The rock bites into your skin. 

You feel so god damn tender all over, it’s not fair. 

You press down with your hand and ease your face and chest from the rock. It hurts. You do it anyway. You manage to turn over onto your back and panic when your leg falls off the rock. You’re right on the edge. You press your calf to the side of the rock and breathe deeply. You’re not gonna fall. You’ll move in a bit, once you’ve got your heart rate back to normal.

You open your eyes. It’s either dawn or dusk, that almost-daytime but everything’s dim time. You won’t know which one until you get your bearings. You make note of all the worst places of hurt in your body and decide that it could be a lot worse. You think you can sit up and scooch into a more stable position. 

You turn your head to the side and scope out the size of the rock you’re on. It’s big, but low down, close to the ocean. You’d rather be on that one over there, a bit smaller but less likely to get wet. You don’t need hypothermia. Once you’re dry, you intend on staying dry. 

You’re not dry. Another wave splashes against the rock moderately gently and you get hit by the spray. You’ve been shaking since you woke up, but you still manage to shudder more violently in response. You’re not quite sure if the shakes are from cold or shock, but you’ll deal with them later. 

You turn your head to the other side to see how close to the edge you are. 

You shriek and almost scramble away instinctively before your hand catches on the edge again and you realise the stupidity of that. There’s a man in the water, elbows resting on your rock and propping his head up so he can watch you. 

He laughs at your panic. The asshole!

‘What the actual fuck?’ you try to say. Your voice is not a thing you can do, though. Apparently wordless shouts are immune from your sore throat, but words aren’t.

The man sinks slightly lower into the water and adjusts so his arms are flat and his chin is on his hands. His ears are fae sized, not human, and besides, you don’t recognise him. He’s not one of your crew.

You lick your lips ineffectively with your dry tongue and clear your throat.

‘Who are you?’ you rasp.

He cocks his head to the side and you see gills on his neck. Oh fuck. A merman or a siren. You glance behind you, but you’ve sort of run out of rock to back away on. You don’t trust your legs yet.

He doesn’t seem to be in a killing mood though, he’s just watching you. Rationally, he’s half man, half sea-beast. So, you should be able to intimidate him. You have practice intimidating both men and beasts. They’re remarkably similar.

You sit up straight, ignoring the ache in your back, and push your hair from your face and behind your shoulders. Your robotic arm continues to hang uselessly from your shoulder, but you can do shit one handed. 

The merman makes warbly noise and you clap your hand over one ear automatically. You glare at your traitor robot arm and it's inability to save you. 

The merman laughs again. He makes the warbly noise for a lot longer and you think he’s speaking to you. Speaking. Not singing. You take your hand from your ear cautiously. 

‘I don’t know what you’re speaking, but it’s not my language,’ you tell him. 

His ears flick around as he listens to you. One of them catches on his hair. You can see that it’s blond now, which you couldn’t before. The sky is beginning to lighten. You hope you’ve only been out for the remainder of the night since the crash, not a full day and another night on top of it. 

‘I don’t suppose you can understand me?’

The merman starts to speak again. This time there’s a rhythm to it, but it’s still not what you would call singing. You listen carefully and find that every time, just before he pauses for breath, he makes a noise that sounds like “aw”.

‘Shut up,’ you tell him. ‘Are you singing or not? I can’t tell. Are you … rapping?’

The merman suddenly jumps and looks down at the ocean. He holds up a webbed finger, as if asking you to wait (why does that translate and not the language?) and then pushes away from the rock and disappears. 

You wait about ten seconds before you decide he’s not the boss of you and you hate him anyway and he probably caused your ship to crash. You have no idea why you didn’t hear his song before or why whatever he was doing with his voice then had no affect on you, but you’re not chancing it. You’re going to climb to the tallest rock, where he can’t follow you, because you have legs and he doesn’t.

Sucker.

You heave yourself to your feet and stare distastefully at your broken robot arm. It’s worse having it hang there all limp than it would be to just take it off. You’ve managed with just your little stumpy shoulder part before, this is actively causing discomfort in addition to being useless. But the metal is grafted into your skin, you’re not sure you can just remove it without hurting yourself further. In your state, you really can’t afford to lose blood or do anything that will weaken you.

Your knees are shaking way too much for you to trust them even in the small jump to the next rock. You reluctantly sit back down and examine the joins in your arm to see if you can maybe disconnect part of it. You’ve barely looked at it in any great detail. It worked, that was enough for you, you didn’t feel the need to examine it.

And no, _Rose_ , that doesn’t mean anything, you don’t see her going around staring at her own body parts even if they’re all made of flesh and not super strong rad metal. Though you will admit that you could have paid a little more attention to how Equius put the thing together for you. Maybe if you had’ve, you could have detached your arm and used it to slap people with it. That would be funny.

The merman pops out of the water again, blond hair plastered to his face. He pushes himself onto the rock as well and you get your first look at his tail. It’s brown, orange and white, and his skin blends into it very naturally. He glances at you briefly before staring back in the water. 

A moment later a second merman surfaces. He’s all purple tones, even in the human half. 

He warbles angrily at the orange one, if you can apply human standards of tone to merpeople. The orange one holds his hands up defensively and shuffles awkwardly towards you. 

‘What, you couldn’t drown me on your own?’ you ask, standing up again. You’ll take the height advantage even with the uncontrollable shakes, thanks. ‘What kind of pathetic water-freak are you?’

They both stop jabbering to look at you. Then the purple one starts to sing. You can tell it’s singing. You glare him down. Eventually he stops and just stares at you blankly.

You laugh coldly and attempt to flick your hair over your shoulders. A metric tonne of it slaps you in the face and sticks there. You pretend that was what you were going for.

‘Looks like I’m immune! What are you gonna do now?’

‘Handsss,’ the purple one says, before launching himself onto the rock. His fins are so dark they’re almost black, and you have to admit he’s a lot more intimidating than the orange guy. 

You hold your ground though, and put your hands on your hips. Hand. Fuck. Still works. Point is, you’re ready to kick the bastard if he really wants to attempt to manually kill you.

The purple one awkwardly drags himself across the rock. The orange guy moves with a lot more grace and puts his hand on Purple’s shoulder. He makes a bunch of noise.

‘Dirrrrrrrrrrk,’ Purple says.

‘Errrrrridaaan,’ Orange says. 

Purple glares at Orange for a while before he flops back into the water, dunking himself under before leaning on the rock like Orange was doing before. 

‘Speeak,’ Purple says to you.

You tilt your chin up and look down on him. You’ll speak. But only because you want to, not because he told you.

‘Not gonna kill me, then?’ you say. You make sure to keep your tone cocky, like you don’t believe they could even if they wanted to.

‘Dirrrk’s pet,’ Purple says.

You bristle.

‘I am not a pet!’

‘Can eeeat, then?’

Dirk, because that must be Orange’s name, makes a big chattery noise.

‘Learrrrned forr wwaarr,’ Purple says. ‘Not forr thisss. You’rrre wwelcome, Errridan wwill help wwith pet talking.’

‘Is that your name, then? Eridan?’

‘Errridan,’ Eridan corrects. 

You shrug. You’re not good at rolling your ‘r’s, you’re not going to embarrass yourself by trying. Your version is better, anyway.

‘Why isn’t Dirk talking to me?’

‘Dirrrk stupid.’

Dirk makes angry noises. Apparently he can understand just fine.

‘He issss vvverrry stupid. Three languagesss only. Like he doesn’t carrre to knowww the enemy.’

Dirk sighs and looks at you as if he expects you to commiserate with him about his awful taste in companion.

‘Did he sink my ship?’ you demand.

‘Yessss,’ Eridan grins. ‘ _Tasssty_ enemy.’

‘Gross,’ you tell him. ‘What fucking bullshit. I can’t believe I have to deal with this. We weren’t due to make port for _ages_ , we must be in the middle of the fucking ocean.’

Eridan looks at Dirk uncertainly before dunking himself in the water again. Dirk doesn’t appear to need to stay as wet.

‘Dirrrrk’s pet?’ Eridan asks.

‘No!’ you say, kicking a loose rock at him in protest.

Dirk grimaces at you and hops back in the water before resurfacing closer to you. He speaks to you unintelligibly for almost a full minute before you lean down and hit him across the head for forgetting you don’t speak his language. You’re not interested in whatever soliloquy he has for you!  
Eridan laughs until Dirk lunges at him and they both fall off the rock. 

You sigh and sit back down. You’re not in any danger from those idiots. You need to get your arm off. The meridiots can wait.


End file.
